Month: August 2012

Back from a week’s break today to enjoy a spot of gloating on Twitter by supporters of holding the Olympic equestrian events in Greenwich Park. According to ITN’s Alastair Stewart and my Telegraph colleague Dan Hodges it was “fantastic,” whatever poor old me may have thought. Another slightly less well-known local media personality, Darryl Chamberlain, proclaimed that “across south-east London, thousands of people felt their hearts swell with pride as our park…took on a new identity, and was showed (sic) off to the world.” How could Darryl know what thousands of people were feeling, I wonder? Did he ask them? How on earth did he find the time?

In the face of this sort of faith-based reporting, I thought it was time for some, well, reporting-based reporting – so this afternoon I did ask dozens of south-east Londoners, specifically the traders of Greenwich, what had been their experience of the Games, and specifically the effects on their businesses. The words “fantastic” and “swelling with pride” didn’t come up much. Here’s what they said:

Phadi Bhattarai, owner, Monsoon Café, Turnpin Lane: “It was bad for us – we are 50 per cent down on a normal summer. It’s been bad the whole summer, not just the Games period, because the park is closed. We had to throw away a lot of food and my business is at risk.”

Malia Nilsson and Holly Gould, Red Door Café, Turnpin Lane: “It’s been quite dead here, to be honest. We’re down about half. The whole summer has been bad due to the park closing. It’s the summer attraction of Greenwich and it’s not here. The council made us take in our outside tables and they even made the house opposite take in its flowerpots.”

Volkan Besler and Helena Bloomer, Bar du Musee, Nelson Road: “It’s affected us really badly. We bought barbecues, extra food, we had to throw a lot of stuff away. [On the barbecue] we made more food for ourselves than we managed to sell. You could see thousands of people marching past, but they herded them straight from the station to the park. There were signs on the approach roads saying ‘Greenwich – avoid area.’”

Angela and David Fireman, owners of Mr Humbug sweetshop, Greenwich Market: “It’s been awful. It’s normally quite busy in the summer, but the families have stayed away. We are edging towards 20 per cent down. Quite a few tourists have been very disgruntled that the park and the observatory are closed. The objectives of the Olympic visitors are completely different – you’re sitting in a stream and they’re not going to stop. I opened longer on Saturday after the end of the modern pentathlon and I took £6 in an hour.”

Morad Benotmane, manager, Nauticalia, Nelson Road: “It’s not been great, to be honest, not what we expected. For the first two weeks we were down by about 40 per cent, but we climbed back a little last week. This is normally our Christmas, this is when we make our money for the year.”

Kane Goddard, co-owner Goddards Pie Shop, King William Walk: “It’s been at least 50 per cent down. I loved the Olympics but it’s had a very big detrimental effect on our business. I have a major issue with the emphasis on keeping people away from London – it’s been too one-sided and it’s really had a dramatic effect. The market is suffering unbelievably.”

Isaac Lilos, co-owner, Arty Globe, Greenwich Market: “Compared to a normal summer we are 30% down. It is heartbreaking – we had thousands of people walking past who couldn’t get to us [because Locog erected barricades to funnel people to the park.] It felt like somebody has organised a party in your house, then locked you in a room. I specifically raised this with Paul Deighton [chief executive of Locog] and I was assured by everybody that it would not happen. They’ve not really given anything back to the community and it’s very annoying.”

In almost 35 interviews, I found only one trader – Julie Bates of Arc Angel – who said that the Olympics had benefited her business, and even then only fractionally. The story everywhere else was the same – non-Olympic tourists and regulars scared away; Olympic visitors either not interested in anything but the sport, or corralled away by barricades from the independent shops into Locog’s corporate bubble. The barricades were slightly relaxed after what one trader described as a “near-riot” by the shopkeepers – but not by nearly enough to rescue their summer.

It isn’t over, either. There’s another six weeks until the town centre returns to normal. And we won’t know the final cost of the Olympics until we know whether we’re getting our precious park back in the same condition we left it. Locog have been doing a lot of extra concrete piling in there to anchor the arena in the wet weather. Let’s hope they can get it all out again, shall we? They’ve promised a complete restoration – but this is an organisation that has broken almost every previous promise to the community that it has ever made.

I’m sure a lot of people will say that none of this matters because we had a great party. We did have a great party. But it does matter. Greenwich Park, and the small shops which give our World Heritage site its character, are of more lasting value to London than the feelgood factor generated by the Olympics. In any case, we could have had just as good a party at Windsor Great Park – if not a better one. As equestrian experts have written, having the cross-country in the cramped confines of Greenwich may have cost us our first gold medal of the Games, in the eventing (which for the benefit of some of my critics is a different discipline from the ones in which we did win gold medals.) There would also have been a rather better TV backdrop – that little shack called Windsor Castle – and a permanent legacy for the sport.

Perhaps the most depressing pop at the Games’ detractors came from Nigel Fletcher, the deputy leader of the opposition on Greenwich council, director of the Centre for Opposition Studies no less, and the local opposition spokesman on the Olympics. He is symbolic of the way that the people supposed to be scrutineers have turned into cheerleaders, and may help explain why the council and Locog were allowed to get away with screwing the local traders so badly.

Mr Fletcher, Alastair Stewart, Dan Hodges, and I may be lucky enough to have secure, well-paid jobs. But my neighbours’ jobs, businesses and livelihoods have been put at risk for something that simply didn’t need to happen in Greenwich. In the end, that too is more important than some nice TV pictures.

I went to watch the men’s Olympic time trial today – partly because it ran down the road where I grew up and partly to see how great the whole Games could have been.

This was one of the very few genuinely democratic events of the Olympics, where anybody could just turn up without needing to play the website ticket lottery. There were no empty sponsors’ spaces here – almost every inch of the route was lined with sponsors (ie us) who actually wanted to be there.

There were no fences or soldiers. There was nobody hectoring us through loudhailers, no signs ordering us around. There were no restrictions on bringing food, no banned corporate logos. Unlike Central London, or poor old Greenwich, the local area was busy and the local shops were doing good business – because Locog and the IOC weren’t there to lock everyone inside their ghastly enclosures. It showed clearly what the Games could have done for London if they’d been spread out over the city.

The time trial is, bluntly, not the world’s most interesting spectacle – one cyclist flashes past every minute and a half or so. They are racing the clock, not each other, so you can’t tell who’s winning unless you have a smartphone or radio. It’s all over in about half an hour.

But we did get to see Bradley Wiggins about five minutes before he became the greatest Olympian in British history. The famous sideburns were, alas, covered by one of those red space-helmets, but I can only imagine what it must have been like for him being roared and cheered for 27 miles through the roads of his own country. On parts of the course, you could stand within a few inches of the riders with no barrier between you. There was no need for security – people were trusted to behave themselves, which of course they did. I hate to imagine the fate which would have befallen any Trenton Oldfield-style idiot who tried to disrupt the race.

And the streets were I was, in Twickenham, were rammed four or five deep – which tells me how keen people are to experience the Games, if only they are allowed to. I’ve been to the Olympic Park this week, too – and I know which I prefer.

ABOUT ME

I am senior correspondent for The Sunday Times, previously at the Telegraph, the London Evening Standard, and the BBC's Today programme. I'm a winner or nominee of various awards, including the Paul Foot Award, the Orwell Prize, Amnesty International Media Awards, British Journalism Awards and Foreign Correspondent of the Year and Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards (winner 2008, nominee 2015).

I'm also head of the Capital City Foundation at Policy Exchange and a former cycling commissioner for London. This is my personal blog.

This site includes archived posts published on my Telegraph blog between 2009 and 2014. The paper has now closed all its blogsites, so links in the posts to Telegraph blogs (including my own) don't work - but you can find anything of mine by using the search box below.